1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the delivery of electronic documents, and in particular to a method for delivering an electronic document having hyperlinks to a remote electronic device.
2. Background Information
Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructures support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations or handheld electronic devices, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. Numerous types of mobile communication devices are known. Examples of such mobile communication devices include, for instance, personal data assistants (PDAs), handheld computers, two-way pagers, cellular telephones, and the like. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, bandwidth and processing constraints of such devices present challenges to the downloading and viewing of documents, such as word processing documents, tables and images.
Electronic documents are produced using various computer programs, such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, financial software, and presentation software. In addition to text, documents can contain navigational information such as hyperlinks and bookmarks. As is known in the art, and as used herein, a hyperlink refers to a graphic or piece of text in a hypertext document that allow you to “jump” to another section of the same document or to another document on a network such as the World Wide Web by activating (e.g., clicking on) the hyperlink. In addition, as is known in the art, and as used herein, a bookmark, also known as an anchor, refers to the destination of a particular hyperlink (i.e., the location within the particular document that was pointed to by the hyperlink).
When the user of a mobile communication device wishes to access an electronic document which resides on a remote computer and view a certain part of the document on the mobile communication device, the entire electronic document is typically transmitted over a potentially bandwidth-constrained wireless network to the mobile communication device. This often happens when a user of a mobile communication device wishes to open and view an attachment to an email message. In wireless communications systems, attachments are typically not automatically included with an email message due to bandwidth constraints, but instead are stored on the email server and must be requested in order to open and view them. For example, if a 400-page document is attached to an email, and a user wishes to view only the one-page terms and conditions section of the document that is pointed to by a hyperlink provided in the document (the terms and conditions are a bookmark), the entire document is typically transmitted to the mobile communication device, of which the user only views a small portion on the mobile communication device.
Once on the device, the electronic document is viewed using the mobile communication device's user interface, which typically differs from the user interface used to create and view the document on a personal computer. For example, while the user interface on a personal computer used to create an electronic document may include a large, color display and a pointing device such as a mouse, the mobile communication device may have a small, non-color screen, and may not have a mouse. In addition, the mobile communication device typically has greater processing power and memory limitations than a personal computer used to view the electronic document, which may be very large in size. Thus, there is a need for an improved method for delivering electronic documents, particularly those containing hyperlinks, to a remotely located electronic device, such as a mobile communication device.